COMIC-CON 2010: Nicolas Cage gets mad in ‘Drive Angry3D’

July 23, 2010 | 9:17 p.m.

Nicolas Cage is mad as hell — maybe because he just escaped from there. In Summit’s upcoming thriller “Drive Angry 3D,” Cage plays a father who returns from the dead to wreak vengeance on the man who killed his daughter and kidnapped her baby. (The film’s title came during a brainstorming session director Patrick
Lussier held on Groundhog Day several years ago — he recalled one of
the many memorable lines from the holiday-themed Bill Murray comedy:
“Don’t drive angry.”)

At a Friday morning Comic-Con panel in Hall H, Cage compared the role to “abstract art” or “improvisational jazz.”

“I am eclectic,” Cage said. “There are very few ways to open up in acting the same way people do with abstract art. One way to do that is to play characters who are high on drugs. Another way to do that is to play characters who are from somewhere else.”

With “Drive Angry,” Cage, who previously starred in the 2000 car-heist remake “Gone in Sixty Seconds,” goes from “Raising Arizona” to raising Cain. Driving a souped-up 1969 Dodge Charger, he hurtles through one spectacular chase scene after another.

At a time when seemingly every movie serves up fantastical computer-generated stunts, Lussier decided to take a more traditional approach and use only real cars for the movie’s action sequences. In one scene, a police vehicle cartwheels off a bridge, shearing a bumper as it spins off the concrete.

“We actually hit the side of the bridge,” Lussier said and then offered apologies to the state of Louisiana, where the movie was shot, for the damage.

Cage, who does most of his own driving stunts in the movie, chimed in, “It’s no secret I like to drive and drive fast.”